How to Think: Managing brain resources in an age of complexity.

1. Synthesize new ideas constantly.
2. Learn how to learn (rapidly).
3. Work backward from your goal.
4. Always have a long-term plan.
5. Make contingency maps.
6. Collaborate.
7. Make your mistakes quickly.
8. As you develop skills, write up best-practices protocols.
9. Document everything obsessively.
10. Keep it simple.

So says Ed Boyden, an assistant professor in the MIT Media Lab and MIT Department of Biological Engineering.

In some ways this seems more like ways to avoid thinking new thoughts, while emphasizing categorization, confirmation bias, and general immunity to novelty. I'll pick one of his rules, Work backward from your goal, to explain.

3. Work backward from your goal. Or else you may never get there. If you work forward, you may invent something profound--or you might not. If you work backward, then you have at least directed your efforts at something important to you.

I should think that discovering what is important to you is a primary goal, but working backward from that goal seems a poor way to achieve it.

I need to think about it more, but Boyden's list seems more about problem solving than thinking. Given a problem, or a goal, these rules might help solve or achieve objectives. Perhaps more emphasis on communication and group work would be useful since heuristically diverse groups tend to be so very good at problem solving, especially complex problems.